Sam Allardyce's February miracle has been a victory for Alf Tupper lovers everywhere. But is there really hope in the Premier League for the homegrown manager?
A decade ago I discussed with Ron Atkinson, that least reconstructed of football managers, the arrival of suspect European habits in the top tier of the English game. At the time, much was being made of the virtues of Arsène Wenger's insistence on a scientific nutritious diet for his Arsenal players. Atkinson did not have too much truck with wholefoods: "What people forget," he said, "is that it's not just the good teams that do it in France and Spain. It's the crap teams as well. The pasta and broccoli doesn't help them. If it suited a player of mine to have a fry-up before he went out, then he'd have a bloody fry-up. When I see these dieticians I always think of Alf Tupper in the Rover comic, who used to win the Olympics on fish and chips out of the wrapper ..."
In the years since, that conversation has sometimes come to mind when first the national team and then club after club has "gone down the continental route" and appointed a manager or coach – a saviour – from across the water. One result has been that Atkinson's archetypal Alf Tuppers have long been in retreat from perceived sophisticates in slim-fit suits. While British – and particularly English – football managers have been caricatured as struggling in their native language, the advance of great communicators from abroad – even trailing interpreters – has come to seem inexorable. For the first time, this Premier League season began with half of the clubs run by coaches brought in from the rest of Europe and beyond. As desperation has begun to set in at certain clubs, five more have been added since then (two at Fulham alone), but for the first time in recent weeks it seems that the stereotype might perhaps have run its course.
Even José Mourinho, the singular cause of the universal desire for metrosexual messiahs among Premier League directors and fans, recently lamented the influx. "At this moment in the Premier League – and I know I'm speaking against myself – I disagree with so many foreign coaches in this country," he observed, with particular reference to the renaissance of Steve McClaren, who had to take his brolly to the Netherlands to restore his reputation. "I don't see a reason for that because I don't feel the English managers are in any point behind the foreign ones ... I just feel sorry that in a football country like England managers are not getting enough jobs in this country. The main culture has to be always British."
If there are signs, with the recent (albeit precarious) appointments of Tim Sherwood at Spurs and Garry Monk as an interim at Swansea, that owners are more alive to the idea that imports might not always be the answer, then you can probably trace the shift to the realisation that for every Special One there is also an AVB. The appointment of André Villas-Boas, Mourinho's mini-me, first at Chelsea and then again at Spurs was a classic example of the shameless attraction of recruiters everywhere for the candidate who looks the part.
Critically, AVB had known only success in his brief career in Portugal; given that the long Premier League winter requires above all an ability to cope with discontent, that CV proved dramatically and almost instantaneously insufficient– twice. Something of the same seems to have done for the mercurial Michael Laudrup at Swansea (when Monk was appointed there were strange mutterings from the boardroom about the manager's affection for Paris and of "our club being returned to us") and, though it is very early days, you fear for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at Cardiff, another who has known almost exclusively golden times both at Manchester United and in his Norwegian career – no preparation at all, you imagine, for employment with Vincent Tan.
It is notable that among clubs in the lower half of the Premier League – which is to say, this season, those involved in a 38-game relegation scrap – the three most inspired managerial performances have all come from old-school British gaffers, men who have crucially known as much of disaster as triumph, and lived to tell the tale.
Tony Pulis has provided an immediate sense of discipline and order at Crystal Palace that has offered a real sniff at avoiding what looked inevitable relegation (a fate that the former Stoke man, famously, has never suffered). Likewise, Steve Bruce at Hull has married pragmatism with a sense of adventure, in a manner that you suspect would have had commentators melting had he done it with a Spanish or South American inflection, rather than in his affable Geordie. Big Sam's February miracle at West Ham, meanwhile, has been a victory for Alf Tupper lovers everywhere.
As past England managers Sven‑Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello knew only too well, in what, despite the pseudo‑scientific analysis, is essentially a cultish environment of blind faith and desperate hope, one of the greatest assets a football manager can bring is a sense of the unknown. As with witch doctors or homeopaths, the less the new man says of his methods the more chance he has of preserving belief in them.
In this respect homegrown managers have a disadvantage: they can rarely appear gnomic, only garrulous or glum. For though as everyone is aware the league tables each year can be pretty accurately plotted in advance by revenue and spend, miracles are universally expected. (It is an irony that the man who deviated most significantly from his predicted position in the money league last season, Steve Clarke at West Brom, was among the first to be sacrificed this time, for a little-known Pepe Mel, as soon as his club hovered near its expected level.)
Predictably, Sherwood and Monk have been praised for their "openness" and "honesty" in the weeks that they have transformed the spirit of their respective clubs. It remains to be seen whether there is enough mystery in that approach to keep them employed. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
A decade ago I discussed with Ron Atkinson, that least reconstructed of football managers, the arrival of suspect European habits in the top tier of the English game. At the time, much was being made of the virtues of Arsène Wenger's insistence on a scientific nutritious diet for his Arsenal players. Atkinson did not have too much truck with wholefoods: "What people forget," he said, "is that it's not just the good teams that do it in France and Spain. It's the crap teams as well. The pasta and broccoli doesn't help them. If it suited a player of mine to have a fry-up before he went out, then he'd have a bloody fry-up. When I see these dieticians I always think of Alf Tupper in the Rover comic, who used to win the Olympics on fish and chips out of the wrapper ..."
In the years since, that conversation has sometimes come to mind when first the national team and then club after club has "gone down the continental route" and appointed a manager or coach – a saviour – from across the water. One result has been that Atkinson's archetypal Alf Tuppers have long been in retreat from perceived sophisticates in slim-fit suits. While British – and particularly English – football managers have been caricatured as struggling in their native language, the advance of great communicators from abroad – even trailing interpreters – has come to seem inexorable. For the first time, this Premier League season began with half of the clubs run by coaches brought in from the rest of Europe and beyond. As desperation has begun to set in at certain clubs, five more have been added since then (two at Fulham alone), but for the first time in recent weeks it seems that the stereotype might perhaps have run its course.
Even José Mourinho, the singular cause of the universal desire for metrosexual messiahs among Premier League directors and fans, recently lamented the influx. "At this moment in the Premier League – and I know I'm speaking against myself – I disagree with so many foreign coaches in this country," he observed, with particular reference to the renaissance of Steve McClaren, who had to take his brolly to the Netherlands to restore his reputation. "I don't see a reason for that because I don't feel the English managers are in any point behind the foreign ones ... I just feel sorry that in a football country like England managers are not getting enough jobs in this country. The main culture has to be always British."
If there are signs, with the recent (albeit precarious) appointments of Tim Sherwood at Spurs and Garry Monk as an interim at Swansea, that owners are more alive to the idea that imports might not always be the answer, then you can probably trace the shift to the realisation that for every Special One there is also an AVB. The appointment of André Villas-Boas, Mourinho's mini-me, first at Chelsea and then again at Spurs was a classic example of the shameless attraction of recruiters everywhere for the candidate who looks the part.
Critically, AVB had known only success in his brief career in Portugal; given that the long Premier League winter requires above all an ability to cope with discontent, that CV proved dramatically and almost instantaneously insufficient– twice. Something of the same seems to have done for the mercurial Michael Laudrup at Swansea (when Monk was appointed there were strange mutterings from the boardroom about the manager's affection for Paris and of "our club being returned to us") and, though it is very early days, you fear for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at Cardiff, another who has known almost exclusively golden times both at Manchester United and in his Norwegian career – no preparation at all, you imagine, for employment with Vincent Tan.
It is notable that among clubs in the lower half of the Premier League – which is to say, this season, those involved in a 38-game relegation scrap – the three most inspired managerial performances have all come from old-school British gaffers, men who have crucially known as much of disaster as triumph, and lived to tell the tale.
Tony Pulis has provided an immediate sense of discipline and order at Crystal Palace that has offered a real sniff at avoiding what looked inevitable relegation (a fate that the former Stoke man, famously, has never suffered). Likewise, Steve Bruce at Hull has married pragmatism with a sense of adventure, in a manner that you suspect would have had commentators melting had he done it with a Spanish or South American inflection, rather than in his affable Geordie. Big Sam's February miracle at West Ham, meanwhile, has been a victory for Alf Tupper lovers everywhere.
As past England managers Sven‑Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello knew only too well, in what, despite the pseudo‑scientific analysis, is essentially a cultish environment of blind faith and desperate hope, one of the greatest assets a football manager can bring is a sense of the unknown. As with witch doctors or homeopaths, the less the new man says of his methods the more chance he has of preserving belief in them.
In this respect homegrown managers have a disadvantage: they can rarely appear gnomic, only garrulous or glum. For though as everyone is aware the league tables each year can be pretty accurately plotted in advance by revenue and spend, miracles are universally expected. (It is an irony that the man who deviated most significantly from his predicted position in the money league last season, Steve Clarke at West Brom, was among the first to be sacrificed this time, for a little-known Pepe Mel, as soon as his club hovered near its expected level.)
Predictably, Sherwood and Monk have been praised for their "openness" and "honesty" in the weeks that they have transformed the spirit of their respective clubs. It remains to be seen whether there is enough mystery in that approach to keep them employed. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.